Bellah Challenges Academia's Limits

Although his ideology has changed since his days as an undergraduate member of the Communist Party, Robert N. Bellah '48, a sociologist and professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley, has spent his entire life at the cutting edge of the academy.

"He's been tremendously influential.... He's sparked new ideas wherever he's gone," says Ann Swidler '66, a sociologist who co-wrote Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life and The Good Society with Bellah.

"He cares not only about the intellectual achievement of a given work of scholarship but about its moral implications," she says.

Swidler credits Bellah with developing ideas "which have become part of the woodwork" of academia, such as the concept of civil religion, a term he coined in an influential 1966 paper, "Civil Religion in America."

Bellah is best known for Habits of the Heart and The Good Society, which were both attempts to understand the limitations of individualism in American political culture.

He has also authored several other influential works, including Broken Covenant, a critique of America and its culture, in particular the country's involvement in Vietnam, and Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditionalist World.

But Bellah's writings were published long before his works became mandatory reading in debates over civic engagement.

His senior thesis on Apache kinship systems, which helped him earn a summa cum laude degree, won the Phi Beta Kappa prize and was published.

His first book, Tokugawa Religion, was based on his Harvard graduate dissertation for a joint degree in sociology and Far Eastern languages, and it is still in print more than 40 years later.

During his college days, Bellah "spent a lot of time studying and reading," says Eli J. Sagan '48, a college friend of Bellah's who remains close to him today. "He was probably the most prepared student I ever met."

"He was very well liked by his professors," Sagan adds.

Outside of the classroom, Sagan says Bellah was "very much involved with politics" as an avowed Communist and a member of the Harvard Liberal Union (HLU).

Sagan recalls how when HLU introduced a resolution stating that the organization should exclude Communists, Bellah was the only student willing to speak out and identify himself as a member of the Party despite fierce anti-communist sentiment.

"There were people at Harvard who were Communists, but they were all secret," Sagan recalls. "No one was in the open."

"At the meeting at which the resolution was about to be voted upon, Bellah got up and said, `My name is Robert Bellah, and I am a member of the Communist Party."

"He did what I don't think one person in a thousand would do," Sagan says.

Bellah's openness ultimately made it difficult for him to stay at Harvard.

His graduate fellowship was threatened, and he was pressed to identify members of the Communist Party, even though Bellah had left the Party by his graduate school days, according to an essay he wrote in Beyond Belief.

Although his fellowship was ultimately saved, an offer of a job as a Harvard instructor was made contingent upon similar conditions, so Bellah left the University for good.

Despite the circumstances of his departure, Bellah, who was on vacation in Italy as this article was written, writes fondly of his years as a social anthropology concentrator and graduate student inBeyond Belief.

"Harvard was in many ways a liberation for me. Instead of the isolation I felt in high school, I felt supported in the intellectual as well as political ideas I was beginning to develop," he writes.

"It's hard for current undergraduates to appreciate that in the post-war era, the link between freedom and democracy and learning was more appreciated. It's hard to recapture that in the more professionalized academic climate today," Swidler says.

Although Swidler says Bellah "had opportunities to go back even when they wanted him," Sagan suggests that Bellah's decision was based mostly on the desirability of the Berkeley post.

"The sociology department at Berkeley is a very exciting place, in my view the finest in the country, and Berkeley is a beautiful city," Sagan says.

Bellah is married and has four children and still lives in Berkeley.